It’s Test Build time! We recommend you uninstall your previous test builds before installing this!

Quite a bit of new stuff in here, but much of it isn’t immediately apparent. Several big changes happened under the hood; examples include the way maps are loaded and the complete reorganization of the material palette.

Some of the many other changes and improvements:

• SLOW CRUSHING OF ANY GIBBABLE OBJECT

• Vastly improved collision detection and response, both against terrain and other objects. Still not perfect, but much better
• Physics simulation and graphical framerate decoupled! This means no matter what your FPS is, the physics will behave EXACTLY the same. No more sinking into terrain because things are slowing down.
• Completely new sets of small gibs and particles
• AI mode control – hold down the switch actor button, and then press a direction to select a different mode for the Actor you’re switching away from
• Your team’s actors are now ordered by their horizontal positions in the scene. Press right switch button and you’ll get the closest guy to your right, for example.
• Much fewer intersection problems with the terrain. Things are not as likely to get embedded and weaken bunker walls.
• ‘Tunneling’ through terrain much less likely to happen
• Enemy AI ships won’t appear directly over your base any more, only on opposite half of scene.
• Long wielded devices are prevented from sticking into terrain; can’t poke a long cannon through walls anymore
• Scene terrains are now simple RLE Bitmaps instead of using weird contour files. Paint your terrain with the material palette and save as 8-bit bitmap with RLE compression, and presto you have a terrain
• Only loads all data once on startup of game, so it’s much quicker to reset or restart the scene.
• …Lots more, going to fill out later by looking at source control logs

What this does NOT have:

• Campaign mode.. saving it for the real game.
• Scene Editor.. ditto.
• Gibbable ships and new ships, working on these, some may appear in next test build
• New guys and guns.. may save for real game too
• Ability to force reload of all ini’s without restarting game, will be in next build.

Also, old mods are unlikely to work with this build! We appreciate the huge amount of effort put into all the modifications for previous test builds, but we just can’t afford to spend time dealing with legacy support of not-even-beta versions! The good news is that mods should be relatively easy to bring up to speed with TB14. Later we will try to post some helpful technical outlines of changes between 13 and 14.